The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Umberto Famulari, whose interest is in the use of Instagram in Italian politics, with a particular focus on the 2024 regional elections. This is driven especially by the continued lack of focus on the multimodal integration of images and text in political campaigning. Indeed, studies of Instagram treat posts there as cohesive messages; the way text and images work together or against one another here is far less extensively explored.
Italian regional elections provide a particularly interesting context for this, since they often involve a very diverse range of candidates from the far right to the far left, and gendered and other identity aspects might also come to play a role here. This project examined some 1200 Instagram posts from seven Italian regional elections in 2024, from nine male and five female candidates during the final six weeks of each campaign. These were all manually retrieved and coded.
These posts were coded for their verbal and non-verbal communication strategies, as well as any facial expressions shown, with particular attention to the co-occurrence of such verbal and non-verbal strategies. In some cases, objects in the images simply emphasised key themes of the post’s message; in some, opposing candidates were shown in unflattering poses.
Typical verbal and non-verbal strategies were to convey professionalism; verbal strategies also sought to present policy, mobilise, attack, and advocate for culture and heritage; non-verbal strategies beyond professionalism were mostly focussed on portraying interaction with others, with other categories very rare.
Centre-left candidates were much more diverse in their strategies (mobilising, attacking, policies), while centre-right candidates emphasised cultural heritage. Female candidates also used more diverse strategies than male candidates, with more focus on explaining policies and mobilising voters. Facial expressions overall were more positive than negative, with no difference between male and female candidates.
Overall, then, verbal and non-verbal strategies often diverged rather than converged, with alignment largely limited to a focus on professionalism.
